Iranian filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, a member of the 26th Cairo Film Festival's jury, speaks with Hani Mustafa ----------------------------------------
Born in 1954 in Tehran, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad numbers among the earliest Iranian women directors to be internationally recognised. In 1995 she received the Locarno Festival's bronze leopard for The Blue Veiled and, last year, the Moscow Festival's special jury prize for Under the Skin of the City. Indeed, her success may well have contributed to the rise of slightly younger filmmakers, a generation including Samira Makhmalbaf and Tahmina Milani.
Bani-Etemad showed Under the Skin of the City outside the official competition this year. The tragic portrayal of a working-class family living in a traditional Tehran house in which the only connection between the rooms is a small courtyard, the film follows the trials and tribulations of Toba, the mother, her unemployed husband, and two sons, the eldest of whom becomes involved in drug dealing. The story plays out against the backdrop of the parliamentary elections of 1999, following which Mohamed Khatemi embarked on his second term of office. Bani- Etemad relies on a well-wrought dramatic setup, replacing the documentary techniques so prevalent in contemporary Iranian film with more classic methods.
Bani-Etemad began her career as a television script-writer before making her first documentary in 1977; it would take her another 10 years to make and release her debut feature, Off Limits.
"The use of documentary techniques," she argues, "is part of the reason Iranian cinema acquired its popularity. An even more important reason, though, which accounts for the success not only of Iranian but of many new films around the world, is the use of a distinctly different cinematic language. What attracts audiences to Iranian films is the employment of what might be termed anti-cliché."
If the use of documentary techniques remain an important part of Bani-Etemad's vision, it is far from being her only credo. "I don't believe immersion in real life should always necessitate using documentary techniques," she states. "I started out as a documentary filmmaker and the documentary perspective remains the main component of my view of the world."
In Under the Skin of the City Bani-Etemad does not altogether abandon that vision. Relaying the nitty-gritty details of life in a working-class household her approach to setting assumes anthropological dimensions. The aesthetics of place, it would seem, are a principal part not only of documentary cinema in general but of Bani-Etemad's work in particular. "Before shooting began," she explains, "the actors lived in the house for some time, to get the spirit of the place, to absorb the mood of the story."
Such were Bani-Etemad's strategies in encouraging a professional cast to assume the kind of spontaneity with which the use of non- professional actors had imbued Iranian cinema. The location, she recalls, required as much preparation: "In Iran we have neither studios nor set designing as such. So we found a place that was very close to the place I had conceived of in the script, then started altering it so that it would replicate what I had in mind. We replaced the doors, repainted the walls, brought in our furniture and accessories. We reconstructed almost everything."
In depicting a female breadwinner, Bani- Etemad resumes the concern with women's issues that informs her entire output. (Festival goers may recall the protagonist of May Lady, screened in the 1998 Cairo Film Festival, a recent divorcee who must confront the traditional dilemma of whether to have a new love affair or devote herself to her adolescent son.)
"It's obvious that I am very familiar with women's issues," she concedes, "but I've made films whose themes are completely unrelated to women, too. Under the Skin of the City focuses as much on Abbas, the elder son, as on the mother."
Yet here, as elsewhere, one underlying theme of the drama undoubtedly concerns the role of the female in contemporary working-class Iranian households.
"I believe women have a lot of energy. Nobody realises that. They have the energy to keep the family together. I am sure that if you look at your own society you will find a great many women like Toba."
Actors and locations are but two obstacles in the way of Iranian filmmaking; censorship is another, arguably greater obstacle, a great waste of creative energy.
"It's true we have tight limits. Every time I want to include a scene that might contain something unacceptable to the censors, I must look for an alternative way to deal with it. In May Lady, for example, I tried to replace face-to-face encounters between the woman and her new lover with phonecalls and letters. If I have an idea and I can't find a way to implement it effectively, I prefer not to make the film at all."
Recent reforms in the Iranian government have short-circuited the process of procuring censorial approval, requiring the filmmaker to submit the finished product rather than referring to the censors at every step of the procedure. Will this tendency prevail, or will the more conservative tendencies of the powers that be continue to undermine cinematic freedom?
"There are some conservative people in some places in the government and they are still calling for a tightening of the limits," Bani-Etemad responds. "When my films are screened, though, the majority of the Iranian people are with me. After all, I make these films about their own lives."
Is the success of Iranian cinema partly due to Iranian filmmakers working against the odds, though?
"Even despite being subject to all these pressures, Iranian films still manage to bring up the problems of social life in Iran; and this is what attracts an international audience. I have been on many festival juries and seen excellent films that cost a lot, but they left me with the question: why make them? Iranian films, they do not have much technique, they do not employ the most professional people or means. But they have something to say."
<http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/610/cu7.htm>